Russell's Paradigm
by AngelDormais
Summary: Uncertainties, unlike teapots, cannot be repaired. Donatello misses his father and makes an error in judgment. Leonardo keeps his secrets and makes tea. There's common ground in the guilt of near-failure. Missing scene from "Hacking Stockman".


_a/n: in a recent conversation with a close and long-time fandom friend, we both agreed that the handling of donatello's character arc in btts was poorly done. don deserved more... and leo was a real piece of work for pretending he'd never suffered a similar crisis. though i am far from a fan of btts, this has been picking at my brain ever since._

* * *

He doesn't realize his hands are shaking until Mikey's are on them. Grabbing them by the wrist, his thumb working gently into the ulnar styloids jutting out from his skin. Michelangelo's hands have always been warm and broad. When he touches you, it feels like a leathery hot water bottle. He doesn't usually go for the hands; certainly not Donatello's, whose bony fingers are dwarfed by his little brother's.

"C'mon, Donnie. We've all had a long day."

He's lucky Mikey's hands are still here at all.

Leo ghosts past them. At some point he'd been led into the kitchen. It's Raph who shoves him into the chair as Mikey lets go and scrabbles through the cabinets. The puzzle pieces fall in line with mathematical precision, and he doesn't need Leonardo's four-word explanation that Donatello has been neglecting his basic nutritional needs. Don is all too aware of it. He takes less from the unspoken order, more from the reality of those four words being formed in his brother's voice.

Raph slams a paper plate of toast in front of him. He stares at it until his brother barks at him to shove it into his mouth.

Mechanically, Donatello does so. He doesn't watch Mikey and Leo leave. He doesn't watch Raphael's quiet, blessedly alive presence hawk him from the doorway until even the crust is gone, shifting uneasily in his stomach.

Idiot, he thinks. Stupid, stupid turtle.

Maybe Raph is familiar enough with self-flagellation to see it in someone's eyes. Or maybe his timing is just as impeccable as it always is. He appears at Don's side, hauling him up with a touch that would be manhandling by Don standards but is excessively delicate by Raph standards.

"Let's get you to bed, Braniac," he murmurs quietly. He reaches for Don's headband and loosens it to drop around his neck.

"Wait," Don says. "Master Splinter's room. Please. Can I?"

Raphael pauses, but doesn't look at him. Don can tell he's trying to figure out whether the enlightenment he'd stumbled across today had all been a bunch of hot air. But he only shrugs the shoulder opposite Don's side and starts leading him over, sliding the shoji door open with all the reverence required if the room's occupant actually existed inside it at the moment.

He lets Donatello down onto the futon. Don rolls over, breathes in the scent of sandalwood, and falls asleep in moments.

He wakes up an hour later sensing someone else in the room.

No fear settles in. The presence is powerful but unintrusive, like a predator with brilliant coloring that makes no move to engage its prey. It was a softer one, once, closer to a young creature with sharp, bright eyes. The transition had been somewhere between too subtle to note and blindingly fast. Waking up in a less familiar space, Donatello knows the presence before he knows himself.

"Leo?"

It takes a special person to make silence seem guilty, but Leonardo is a master of both crafts. A pallor of honey-colored light gently blossoms to life in front of Don's eyes. He sits up and sees his brother silhouetted in gold, setting a candle down and snuffing a match between his thigh and thumb.

"Wasn't sure where you were," Leo says. "Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

Don decides to spare his feelings. "If you hadn't, I would have woken up on my own. I've been sleeping in bursts for days now."

Leo nods, like he already knew, and Don knows for a fact that he does. His own poor sleeping habits give rise to the opportunity to observe everyone else's. Leo tends to be sleepless on nights Donatello can find no real pattern to, filling his restless hours in the dojo. Don has never entertained for a moment the idea that Leo has never noticed the opposite. On the rare occasion he manages to fall asleep before Leo finishes, he often wakes up with a blanket draped over him, wherever he may have passed out.

Don's brother moves something to the low table. He blinks at the chipped teapot, lined with cracks of gold. The lotus design on the side marks it as the same one they had in the Y'lintian Lair before Karai had chased them out. When on earth Leonardo had found the time to salvage it and perform _kintsugi_ on it, Don has no idea. It's just one of the things that make him Leo.

Just like the way he pours two cups, one for himself and one for Don, and takes his own into his lap without drinking.

"I thought you might want to talk."

So that's what this is. He takes the tea dutifully from his elder brother, and they both ignore how the mug trembles faintly in Don's grasp. Just like how they both ignore that it's less of an invitation than a demand.

Not that it'll stop Don from trying.

"There's nothing to talk about, Leo. I know I messed up today. Heck, I've been messing up for weeks. I was so… so…" his shoulders slump. "Obsessed. I've been so obsessed with getting Master Splinter back from his _temporary_ limbo, I almost lost all of you guys _permanently_."

 _Again,_ he silently adds.

Leonardo is unmoved. "Too bad you don't know anyone who's made a similar mistake."

Don's gaze bounces up to him in surprise. The Leonardo who returned from Japan was a whole different person from the one who left for it, and none of them had been especially keen on revisiting the jaded being that had taken Leo's place in their lives for months.

They had all thought Leo wanted to close that chapter permanently. He'd never talked about his time in Japan unless they pressed, and even then, it was his training - what the Ancient One taught him. The views of sunrise from the mountaintops. The story in the bundle of tea leaves and the tin of dried cherry blossoms he'd brought home and still keeps in his room.

Leo's eyes are half-lidded as he stares through Don into some empty place. Donatello recognizes the look as the one that removes him half a step from reality, where he can see the shadows and energies interwoven like flowing streams. It makes Don feel safe and vulnerable at the same time, as if his brother is seeing all of him without really trying to.

"Talk to me, Donnie," he says quietly. "Maybe I can help."

 _Help with what?_ Don wants to ask. He's already learned his lesson. Seeing the Shredder about to sink his blades through Leo's throat, returning the favor once granted to him upon the roof of a Foot skyscraper, put everything into perspective with horrifying clarity. Donatello was a fool. He failed his father, and he very nearly failed his brothers. It took a message from _Stockman_ of all people before he even knew he was about to lose them.

"I let you down," he breathes softly. His tea mug trembles, warm like Mikey's hands. "You, Master Splinter… I did everything wrong today, Leo."

"You saved us," his brother points out evenly. Don bites down on a bitter sneer.

"Sure. After _Baxter Stockman_ interrupted me in the middle of collecting one of Sensei's data bits. Did you know I thought he might have been lying? Luring me into a trap of some kind, so he could put me behind a firewall? I wondered if it would be worth risking the data bits to find out."

Don had spent precious seconds in deliberation, wondering if his brothers' lives were worth the risk of falling for a trap. A trap he probably would have been able to hack his way out of. Even loosening the words from his tongue feels like razors in his mouth.

"And if you _had_ ignored him?" Leo asks. Don decides that this tactic of his sucks, and puts plenty of heat into his response.

"You would have died."

"Well, yes," Leonardo says calmly. "But only _then_ would you have let us down. You made a choice and everyone came home. You don't have to forgive yourself for what didn't happen, Donatello. You have to let it go."

"Is that what you learned in Japan, Leo?" It rushes from him like blood from a warm wound, and he can't stop it even to save his brother from the hurt he feels. "To ignore your massive errors in judgment? Did the Ancient One teach you that it was fine to pat yourself on the shell and think, 'Good job today! I was only _one_ slight, terrible decision away from destroying everything left I care about'?"

He can tell the moment his brother struggles to remind himself that this is Don's self-hatred, not an actual critique of the choice he made on that starship years ago. Leo's faraway gaze pulls in a little tighter, pinches between his eyes. It does absolutely nothing to make Donatello feel better about himself.

Then, finally, Leo shakes his head.

"No," he says simply.

And Don thinks he understands. Whatever Leonardo _did_ learn during his banishment - that tiny word all of them will always keep tucked behind their teeth, knowing the pain of separation doesn't necessarily make it accurate - is not for Donatello to know. It's his own quiet burden of growth, that returned to the Hamato clan their son and brother.

His tea is growing colder, or the air around him is burning warmer. He aches for the cool sleeve of cyberspace, more a home to him than to his brothers. Armor built with numbers. Math traced in the lines of the world. A complex world that deconstructs in certainties, because numbers are predictable. Mathematical variables are controllable.

He hates the Shredder for taking this away from him, too.

"What do I do?" he asks faintly. "I miss Master Splinter so much. I feel like him being gone this long is all my fault. Like I'm wasting time. But I just… today scared the hell out of me, Leo. I can't lose you guys again."

It slides from him like the blade from a killing blow. Leo watches him in the dark, his eyes gray and flecked by candlelight like glowing embers in a spray of ash. He sets his tea on the table, untouched.

"You focus."

Focus, he says. There's a gravity in it, a weight of history, but Donatello can't discern what exactly he's supposed to do with that order. He stares at Leo's cup, filled with cracks of gold, and down at the undamaged mug in his own grasp.

He feels so idiotic.

"How? On _what_?"

"Bringing him home." Leonardo's voice is soft, but it's the lack of grief in his brother's voice that makes Don look at him again. Leo watches him with a calm faith, a certainty that the problem in front of him has an unequivocal answer. "Do what you've been doing."

Don narrowly avoids flinging his tea in Leo's face. Has he not been listening for the past five minutes? "What I've been doing nearly got you all killed!"

"Let me finish," Leo says, a hint of annoyance in his tone. "Do what you've been doing. But do it with us. We're a team, Donatello. I'm sorry we haven't been acting like it."

"What?"

"We've been letting you go off on your own," Leo says. " _I've_ been letting you. I saw the warning signs, but I had hoped that you just needed some time to yourself; burn through everything in your head. I should have known better. We should have had this conversation weeks ago. I wanted to apologize for that."

"Of course you did," Don sighs. He immediately regrets it, knowing Leo will take that the wrong way. He quickly sets his tea down. "What I mean is-"

Leo cuts him off with a shrug, adopting that set to his jaw that makes it hard to tell whether he was offended. Don figures it's best to let that one go. Instead, in lieu of his father, he finds himself looking to his brother, his leader, for guidance. Because he is so very tired of feeling lost.

"Master Splinter isn't here right now. But he will be." There's so much serene confidence in Leonardo's promise that Donatello can't help but grasp it, like warm hands or a warm tea cup. " _We're_ here now. All four of us. Let's both remember to keep it that way."

In the end, the lesson that Donatello had already learned. Nothing new or groundbreaking. But when he turns the words over inside him in his brother's voice, they feel less sharp, somehow. Less like wire digging through his insides; more like a promise in a room of warm light.

"Deal," he says. It's inelegant and way too simple to carry the kind of closure that they deserve, but Leonardo smiles nonetheless. He lifts his tea and stands, and Don has already observed the katana slung in their familiar arrangement across the back of Leo's shell. "I don't want you staying up all night, got it? Don't make me chase you down."

Leo grins at him. Donatello feels like he'll never stop thinking it's oddly suited to his brother.

"You'll know the moment I give in, Don."

Don simply nods, not bothering to try and decipher that. As Leo turns and slides the door shut behind him, Donatello reaches for the remaining tea mug and takes a slow pull.

As it lowers from his face, a glint of light catches his eye. He stares at the mug, lined with cracks of shining gold.

It's not the cold sleeve of cyberspace, but it's still a world he knows. Once he finishes his cup, the candlelight and sandalwood guide him back to sleep.

 _(Two hours later, he awakens to darkness with a blanket draped over his shoulders. As he pulls it closer, his shell scrapes against something equally ossified. A presence next to him stirs, small and folded in the dark, and a smell of sword polish and ink doesn't overpower so much as guide the sandalwood closer to him.)_


End file.
